GE 431: German Memories of WWII – From Perpetration to Suffering
Week 1: Mapping the Terrain - Literature and People mentioned in the lecture:
1. Theodor W.Adorno (1903-69) German-Jewish Philosopher and Sociologist. After his
return from exile in 1949 became Prof of Philosophy and Sociology at Frankfurt University.
Most influential German thinker of 2nd half of 20th ct. His idea that the Auschwitz represents
the ‘total integration’ of the individual into a pre-defined collective (i.e. ‘the Jews) and that
the Holocaust is thus the ultimate development of a society run on the principles of
identification, efficiency and instrumental reason results in a conception of the Holocaust as
end-point of an enlightenment gone wrong. Adorno’s idea that the Holocaust represents some
radical rupture in the self-conception of Western civilisation was highly influential and can
be detected e.g. in Dan Diner’s idea that the victims’ perspective is the ‘comprehensive’
perspective from which to view the Holocaust. : ‘The approach oriented toward the
perspective of the victim in no way represents either a purely subjective or even a
complementary way of viewing things. Rather, it is the more comprehensive perspective and
the one more appropriate to the totality of the phenomenon, because it proceeds from the
absolute extreme case.’ Dan Diner, ‘Between Aporia and Apology’, in Peter Baldwin (ed.),
Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the historians’ debate, Boston/Mass., Beacon
Press, 1990, 135-45, p. 143.
2. Collective Memory and Post 1990 Memory of National Socialism:
Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in
frühen Hochkulturen, Munich, Beck, 1997, esp. the first chapter.
Jan Assmann, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, New German Critique, 65,
(Spring-Summer 1995), pp. 125-33.
Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, Georg Grote (eds), Memory Contests. The Quest for Identity in
Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990, Rochester, Camden House 2006.
Bill Niven, Facing the Nazi Past Routledge, 2002. The standard work on Collective memory
in post-1990 Germany.
Helmut Schmitz, On Their Own Terms. The Legacy of National Socialism in Post-1990
German Fiction, BUP, 2004, Introduction, 1-24.
Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, Karoline Tschuggnall, ‘Opa war kein Nazi’.
Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer,
2002. An influential study of German family memory.
3. The Historians’ Debate:
Peter Baldwin (ed.), Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the historians’ debate,
Boston/Mass., Beacon Press, 1990. Contains the exchange between Martin Broszat And Saul
Friedlander and a series of critical essays on the historians’ debate.
4. Germans as Victims:
Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und
Geschichtspolitik, Munich, Beck, 2006. A comprehensive overview over the entire history of
representations of German wartime suffering.
Robert G. Moeller, War Stories. The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of
Germany, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2001. Historiographical
study of post-war German political and cultural discourses with respect to Germans as
victims.
Helmut Schmitz (ed.) A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering
from 1945 to the Present, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2007, Introduction, 1-30.
There is also a Special Issue on German Suffering, of the periodical German Life and Letters
57 (2004) which also contains a bibliography.
5. Trauma, Guilt and Repression:
Alexander & Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern, Munich, Piper, 1967.
Susanne Vees-Gulani, Trauma and Guilt. Literature of Wartime Bombing in Germany,
Berlin and New York, Walter deGruyter, 2003.